Tag Archives: democrats

Welcome to the Confederate States…Your new Republican Congress will be passing a bill shortly to replace the Stars and Stripes….

With the Stars and Bars.

A Tea Party Celebration on the Courthouse Steps

Most of the autopsies of the mid-term election have a number of reasons Democrats lost. Not the least of which had to do with failing to energize their base, despite some fairly desperate pleas in the last few days before the voting.

One of the reasons those efforts fell flat – is in terms of real action, folks are not seeing one hell of a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats talk a good line – but are noticeably absent when it is time to put some solid legislation on the books…Or to swat their Republican counterparts into some form of sanity.

And by Democrats, I am also including the Congressional Black Caucus – which singularly is the most useless non-performing group of useless arsed black people in the country. They are real good at throwing parties and benefits – but don’t do shit when it comes time to put anything of value in action.

The Republicans in the last Congress pointed out a really simple way to bring legislation to a halt. It is called the Filibuster. With 42 black members in the House, you would think these fronting Cabaret has beens could mount one. You want to bring some rationality to what the right wing bozos in the House are going to do the next 2 years…

You stop the fuckers cold. Each time…And every time. You been too chickenshit to do it so far.

If they try and stop the filibuster by shutting down your speech… Bring the house down by raising hell on the floor until they back down – or you decide to walk out en masse.

Here’s the deal. The very first bill they bring to the floor…Kill it. Kill the Keystone pipeline bill. There aren’t any black jobs in there anyway. Obamacare repeal? Kill it. If you don’t then the blood of 30,000 black babies murdered a year by lack of, or indifferent medical care is on your hands.

In 1964, there were five black members of the House of Representatives — barely over 1 percent — compared to the 11 percent of the population who were black. But the American people were evenly split, 30 to 31 percent, on whether blacks should have more or less influence, with 28 percent saying things were “about right” as they stood. What’s more, those opposed to government social spending programs were three times more likely to say blacks should have less influence compared to those supporting social spending.

Those historical tidbits, from “The Political Beliefs of Americans; a Study of Public Opinion” by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, immediately came to mind last week when Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, locked in a tight reelection fight — as always — made a lot of headlines with her comments noting that race had something to do with President Obama’s unpopularity in the state.

“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans,” she told NBC News in an interview. “It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”

This is hardly earth-shattering news from the state that brought us Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1890s, and the deeply racialized devastation of Katrina less a decade ago, after which even President Bush admitted that “deep, persistent poverty” in the area “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” Speaking of Katrina, according to a PPP poll last year, the good people of Louisiana “were evenly split on who was most responsible for the poor Hurricane Katrina response: George W. Bush or Obama, 28/29.” Given that Obama was a first-year senator at the time of Katrina, it’s not hard to see what Landrieu was driving at.

What’s more, the role of race was only a tertiary matter in Landrieu’s account. When asked why the president had such a hard time in the state, Landrieu first said it was “because his energy policies are really different than ours,” then when pushed further, she added, “because he put the moratorium on offshore drilling,” after the disastrous BP oil spill.

It was only after laying out those policy complaints that Landrieu got around to discussing race. Yet, predictably, fourth-tier 2016 GOP presidential wannabe Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor, instantly made an ass of himself, calling her comments “remarkably divisive,” which takes a lot of chutzpah, coming from a racial panderer who just three years ago pledged he would sign a “birther” bill if it reached his desk.

Jindal also claimed that “the people of Louisiana are willing to give everyone a fair hearing,” a claim belied by that PPP poll, and that certainly didn’t apply to Jindal’s own exclusive focusing on Landrieu’s tertiary reference to race. Nor does it comport with the tenacity of birtherism, which has only grown more intense, the more thoroughly it’s been discredited.

Birtherism, you see, has become the GOP’s more widespread manifestation of racial codespeak in the Obama era. Although Obama deftly quieted the elite media trolls with the release of his long-form birth certificate just after Donald Trump had ridden birther hysteria to the top of the GOP primary field in April 2011, the GOP base was never really dissuaded. In fact, nine months later, in January 2012, a YouGov poll found that more Republicans than ever questioned Obama’s citizenship. Those denying his American birth outright were up 50 percent, from 25 percent of all Republicans to 37 percent, while those accepting his American birth were down 10 percent, from 30 percent to 27 percent of all Republicans. Indisputable hard evidence did nothing at all to dissipate the birther delusion, it only made it stronger. That’s not something Mary Landrieu made up. The GOP’s own partisan media did that.

Although birtherism is a complex phenomenon in its own right, Landrieu — like Bush before her — was referencing a much broader problem facing Obama, as well as herself, and the Democratic Party as a whole. You’re not supposed to call it “racism,” because racism means KKK mobs in hoods, and police siccing snarling dogs on young children, and we’re not like that anymore — see, we’ve got armored vehicles and sound cannons now!

But 40 years of data from the General Social Survey — the gold standard of American public opinion research — say otherwise. They tell us that Southern whites overwhelmingly blame blacks for their lower economic status, ignoring or denying the role played by discrimination, past and present, in all its various forms, and that the balance of Southern white attitudes has barely changed at all in 40 years. At the same time, attitudes outside the white South have shifted somewhat — but still tend to blame blacks more than white society, steadfastly ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary — such as 60 years of unemployment data, over which time “the unemployment rate for blacks has averaged about 2.2 times that for whites,” as noted by Pew Research. It is only Democrats outside the white South who have dramatically shifted away from blaming blacks over this period of time, and the tension this has created within the Democratic Party goes to the very heart of the political challenge both Obama and Landrieu face — a challenge that is not going to simply go away any time soon.

Before turning to the GSS data, it’s worth noting that it’s hardly an anomalous finding. A 2011 study from Tufts (press release/full study) found that whites as a whole see racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in discrimination against blacks over the decades are reflected in increases in discrimination against whites, so that now whites are more discriminated against than blacks. This perception is not simply mistaken, it’s downright delusional, flying in the face of mountains of objective data. For example, a June 2014 study by Young Invincibles, “Closing the Race Gap,” found that blacks need to complete two more levels of education to have the same probability of employment as their white counterparts. Nonetheless, as explained in the Tufts press release:

On average, whites rated anti-white bias as more prevalent in the 2000s than anti-black bias by more than a full point on the 10-point scale. Moreover, some 11 percent of whites gave anti-white bias the maximum rating of 10 compared to only 2 percent of whites who rated anti-black bias a 10. Blacks, however, reported only a modest increase in their perceptions of “reverse racism.”…more…

Let’s hope at least 51 Democrats have the cajones to hang on – and not go Yellowback Donkey.

Reactionary Rethugs have derailed and objected to virtually every President Obama appointee, abusing rules which were put there to protect the Minority Party Vote in the Senate…Not as a tool to bring the entire legislative process to it’s knees as a policy.

The Senate on Thursday opened a contentious debate about striking down the long-standing filibuster rules for most presidential nominations, with Democrats appearing poised to do so on a party-line vote that would alter nearly 225 years of precedent.

Infuriated by what they see as a pattern of obstruction and delay over President Obama’s nominees, Democrats tried to trigger the so-called “nuclear option” by bringing up one of the judicial nominees whom Republicans recently blocked by a filibuster.

“It’s manifest we have to do something to change things,” Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in remarks on the Senate floor to open the debate. Reid argued that the Senate has wasted way too much time on things that should be relatively routine — like approving judges and executive-branch nominees.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded by accusing Democratsof a power grab and suggesting that they will regret their decision if Republicans regain control of the chamber.

“We’re not interested in having a gun put to our head any longer,” McConnell said. “Some of us have been around here long enough to know that the shoe is sometimes on the other foot.”

McConnell then addressed Democrats directly, saying: “You may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” he said.

Shortly after 11 a.m., the senators began voting on a motion to reconsider the nomination of Patricia Millet to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That vote could set in motion a complicated parliamentary process that would end with a simple-majority vote to set a new rule, allowing for swift confirmation of executive branch nominees and most selections for the federal judiciary without having to clear a 60-vote hurdle.

If Democrats go through with the threat, it will pave the way for confirmation of several nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who have recently been stymied by GOP filibusters, amid Republican assertions that the critical appellate court simply did not need any more judges…

“I think it’s fair to say that I have gone out of my way in every instance — sometimes at my own political peril and to the frustration of Democrats — to work with Republicans to find common ground to move this country forward. Each time, what we’ve seen in games-playing, a preference to try to score political points rather than actually get something done.” – President Obama

Bad quality – but the enitre broadcast segment. Good back and forth with Ari Fleischer.

Belcher hits the nail on the head – but I wish he had come at it a little differently. The real issue is WHO Cain is playing to and WHY. And why would that audience support Cain’s regurgitation of racist right wing talking points?